So it’s like pr0n, you can’t really define it but you know too much immigrants when you see it ? 
My record will show that I’m not entirely opposed to eating the rich. 
True dat. And then the cage came down ! (with apologies to Dylan Moran)
We don’t really have private concentration camps, tho.
Straya ? No, not really.
Even if it’s not “La Jungle” (and who can tell from a couple of photos), it is quite telling that 100% of the comments from actual camp residents are along the lines of how they despair of living in the refugee camp, how they wish they could leave the camp to attend school or go to work (or indeed do anything besides stare at the walls all day and eat donated food), and complaints about the massive shortcomings in water, sanitation, shelter, and education.
If it were me, well, can’t compare it to catching a bullet or worse in the latest genocide, but I would be devoting 100% of my suddenly copious amounts of free time to escaping from the camp and making my way to a normal fucking place, even at the high risk of dealing with shady smugglers to get to Europe.
There are no small towns in France or the UK? Everyone lives in a city?
How do farmers get to the cultivated fields to work? Do they commute out from their apartments?
I don’t think the number of immigrants in the country is the right way to look at it. The impact any specific number has on any given country isn’t going to be the same.
The USA is third in world by area, just below Canada, just above China, and about 57% the size of Russia. And we’re #1 in arable land, which may be the more relevant statistic, as a lot of land that isn’t arable (steep mountains, permafrost, etc.) is also difficult to live on. We don’t want to fill up all our farmland with houses, of course; but the percentage of arable land we’d have to sacrifice, even if we don’t just build taller or denser which in many areas we could, would be smaller for any given number of additional population (however produced).
https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Agriculture/Arable-land/Hectares
We’re also third in current population, though considerably below China and India.
http://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/
And we’re all the way down at #174 in population density (which goes by total acreage, not arable acreage; so we’d be even lower if arable acreage were the criteria). (India’s #28. China’s #79. France #94. Canada’s 222. Russian’s 214.)
http://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/countries-by-density/
The relatively low population density means that we’ve got more physical space to fit people than most countries do, with potentially less strain on sewer systems, etc. And the relatively high population number means that adding, say, one million people to the USA adds only one person in 330. We added a bit over a million through immigration in 2016: a number this current administration’s trying to reduce. Suppose we doubled it instead – that would still be under 0.7% per year. If even a small town’s population is 3000, and it goes up by 20 people, this is unlikely to cause a ruckus. Even if it goes up by 20 people each year.
And bear in mind that the current 15.3% of residents born elsewhere didn’t all arrive yesterday, or last year. Some of them did; but others have been here for ten years, or forty, or eighty. Their impact as newcomers is long gone.
There are. They’re dying, same as everywhere else, for the exact same reason - one family can work (and owns) a million square miles now and internet deliveries+Netflix ensure they don’t need more than a local minimart and a bar or twelve. We are seeing some gentrification of the countryside thanks to internet though - some younger middle class folk move out to the boonies and do remote work these days. I don’t believe it represents a very significant number though (I could be wrong, I’ve been procrastinating 90% of my required geography work for five years now. Nobody’s noticed yet).
I think Little Nemo and Kobal2 are talking kind of sideways to each other. If I may? (Not like you can stop me)…
It’s a problem with definitions and connotations. Are there rural areas in France? Yes. But a lot of French “rural” is already built in ways which would look like “downtown” to most of America. Right now I’m typing from a little town in Normandy called Le Neubourg (you can google street it to get views). It’s the kind of place where someone who’s lived here and worked here for a mere 20 years is still called “Jean le Neuf” (Jean the New One); where it is still much more normal to spend your whole life in the same job than to switch; people are grateful that the existence of several big factories in the area mean that you can get your HS internship in one of them, decide what you want to study based on what you saw there and come back to work in that same factory until you retire (or the factory gets closed down and “moved to China”). And yet, a lot of housing is mixed uses (store or restaurant on the bottom, housing on top), the relatively-few houses with garden tend to be in the “Anglo-Normand style” (similar to USanian Victorians) and yes, farmers commute by tractor. In a lot of rural Europe, the arrival of the tractor meant that farmers could move to town and send their kids to school daily; farmers that actually live in a farm which isn’t on the edge of a village aren’t even outliers, they’re a curio.
Meanwhile, a lot of “urban” America has population densities that are unbelievable to an European until we see them with our own eyes. Little house. Little house. Little house. Metropolitan Miami has about as much population and occupies about as much space as Spain’s bigger province, but Saragossa is concentrated in apartments in its metro area whereas Miami is wholly carpeted with little house, little house, little house, oh look a building! (In Miami, “building” means “building that’s visible above its neighbors”). People from our high-density areas find that “interesting places” are too far from each other (home from restaurants and schools, for example); people from our low-density areas are used to those distances but are surprised by the lack of space in between, because even those low-density areas have the population concentrated (and commmuting by tractor when not by car or public bus).
And the two kinds of distributions correspond to very different cultural mindsets. In Europe, the last bubble saw the building of a lot of “SimCity areas”, residential areas where you need a car to go get your daily bread. They’re not popular. Some have become ghost towns, despite theoretically being in perfectly desirable areas (I know a couple within Barcelona metro). It’s like “open space” vs “cubicles”: we’re each of us used to one and hate the other. Neither is intrinsically superior, they each grew logically based on what the local needs were, but when each of us says “rural” or “city” or “office” we get different mental images; we have different surrounding expectations, of which we’re often not even conscious. Until we get those concepts clarified it’s going to be difficult to avoid talking beside each other rather than with.
I think most of the proposals here are agreeable if not for one thing: cost.
My major issue with immigration is cost. If we don’t have the infrastructure to process people coming in, then I don’t think people should come in because, well, we can’t process them. Infrastructure costs money. Ideally, yes, we would quickly process and admit everybody in who isn’t a terrorist and is willing to work or whatever. In reality, we don’t have the resources and infrastructure to do that. Simply letting people walk over is unsafe.
For me, the real debate about immigration is how much we are willing to pay. That question cannot be answered in isolation, we will have to weigh all of the other issues on the table such as defense spending, social services, and disaster relief. How much we are willing to pay determines how much and what kind of reform is even possible. We can craft various immigration proposals but without a price tag, of which I see none in this thread, I wouldn’t even consider them.
~Max
How much will it cost to implement those “strong controls”?
I think the quotas are based on agency funding levels, or the funding is based on quotas. How much will it cost to bring them up to speed, and stay that way?
How should your policies be enforced? How much will it cost to do so?
~Max
How much will it cost to provide a public defender and interpreter for every asylum-seeker and refugee? How much will it cost to provide humane accommodations? Of course I want to do all of that. But how much will it cost?
How much do we need to appropriate to federal immigration authorities to take on this responsibility?
~Max
How much will it cost to “close the borders to any new immigrants”? Aren’t the borders already closed, or do you mean we should put up a wall? This verification and enforcement method needs a price tag, too.
I could go on but I think you guys get the point.
~Max
[snip]
Very, very likely less than what the administration is trying to pay for regarding detention.
I have heard before that ‘the cruelty is the point’, but with this administration the point is also about setting cronies or supporters to administer or manage the detention gravy train.
Will you work with me to actually find a number? The comparison isn’t just with current policy, it’s with all the immigration policies. I assert that everybody here thinks our current immigration policy sucks.
To start, we need an estimate on the number of asylum-seekers on the border. The U.S. Government does not provide such a figure, but research at the University of Texas at Austin and the University of San Diego estimates that there are around 26,000 asylum seekers waiting in Mexico (Leutert et al, 2019b). In May there were an estimated 18,700 asylum seekers waiting in Mexico, up from 4,830 in February and 6,190 in November (Leutert et al, 2019a).
A quick tally of the number CBP processes each month is 7,170 people (based on table estimates, using family size of 5, 239*30; Leutert et al, 2019b).
So let’s say something like 2,500+7,000 asylum seekers come to the border every month, and that there are 28,500 there now. I pulled 2,500 by dividing the differences between the August and May estimates by the number of months [(26000 - 18700) / 3 = 2433]. The 7,000 comes from the number of people CBP is estimated to currently process per month. That comes out to 9,500 asylum seekers per month just to break even.
Let’s assume they are all families of five so we can pair five people to a lawyer+interpreter combo at a time. That would be 1,900 families. How about we give each family two hours of billable time with the lawyer, for an average of 24 minutes per person and 3,800 lawyer/interpreter-hours per month total. With about 160 working hours a month, that comes out to about twenty four lawyers and twenty four interpreters working full time.
Off the top of my head I can hire a Spanish interpreter for about $60/hr. I think public defenders make something around $35/hr in family court. Don’t ask me why public defenders are paid less than interpreters. I’m really out of my area of expertise here but I doubt public defense is a full-time job. Maybe UltraVires could help us out with the estimates. Nevertheless, the cost to the government of 72 part-time defenders is the same as 24 full-time defenders. At 160 hours a month that comes out to $9,600/mo per interpreter and $5,600/mo per attorney.
Therefore a generous estimate for the total cost of hiring a defender and interpreter for every asylum seeker is about $364,800 per month. Honestly it’s much less than I thought. Add a couple thousand extra in discretionary spending and we can work on cutting down the 26,000 person queue in Mexico.
But this estimate also depends on CBP upping their processing to include at least the additional 2,500 arrivals each month. The lawyers might help processing a little but they are really there for the immigration court. I believe the actual processing facilities are limited in size and staff. We’ll need to look at that and see how much it will take to bring the processing facilities up to par.
Finally, this number is not instead of detention (or the ankle monitor), but in addition to it. My understanding is that detention takes place after CBP processes the asylum-seeker at the port of entry, while the applicant is waiting for an immigration court hearing. The lawyer and translator would be assigned by CBP during initial processing and present at the hearings.
And ankle monitors are a cheap if controversial alternative to detention. For one, I remember reading about how they ran out of battery, caused bruises, and carried a stigma during the Obama administration. The $320/night for a mother+children in detention versus $5/day/person numbers sound accurate (I think it’s more like $120 for individual detention).
Family case management was a good program, but it wasn’t scalable or as cheap as the ankle monitors. Strapped for cash, ICE dropped it to buy more ankle monitors (Bajak, 2017).
The next questions would be how many immigration judges there are, how many people can they try per day, how much are they paid, how many people are currently in detention/being monitored, and how long do they normally wait?
An April 2018 CNN story cites the Justice Department as saying “the average immigration judge currently completes 678 cases per year” (Kopan, 2018). Not all of those are asylum cases. An NPR piece last month said there are some 900,000 immigration court cases pending as of June (Gonzales, 2019). The subject of that article is how the DOJ is trying (again) to kill the immigration judges’ union. A 2017 NPR piece estimated there were about 2,000 cases per judge in 2017, when there were 600,000 cases in the backlog (Johnson, 2017). That was when the DOJ tied immigration judges’ performance reviews to the number of cases processed. That’s 300,000 cases over three years, plus about 600,000 processed (6783003=310200), for an average of about 300,000 new cases per year. Just under half of those cases are for asylum seekers: according to the most recent data from DHS there were 139,801 new asylum applications in 2017 (DHS, 2019, 7).
The Associated Press reports a total of 444 immigration judges as of April this year. 43% of these judges were appointed by President Trump, many of which are former military lawyers and ICE attorneys (Taxin, 2019). According to the DOJ (Immigration Judge Pay Rates, 2018), immigration judges are paid between $130,000 and $174,500 per year. Let’s say it’s $150,000 a year on average (wild guess). That means the current 444 judges cost $66.6 million/yr, or $555,000/mo.
So we have about 300,000 cases coming in and 300,000 cases being processed per year (678*444=301032). That leaves a stable backlog of only 900,000 cases, or three years per person waiting in detention or with an ankle monitor.
I’ll have to take a break from immigration to look at the rest of the board, but if we can find out how many people are kept in detention and how many get monitors we could make a rough formula to estimate the cost of providing asylum seekers with counsel, plus variables for an acceptable wait for trial, the number of judges, budget caps, etc. If we can get an estimate as to the structural capacity at the ports of entry, the costs of expanding them, and more demographic information on those waiting to be processed (such as family size), then we could calculate cost based on how long we are willing to let asylum seekers wait, and in what conditions, from arrival at the border until the end of the process.
Hopefully I didn’t mess anything up, and a lot of these numbers are rough and based on just one source. You guys have to work with me on this.
Bajak, F. (2017, June 9). ICE shutters detention alternative for asylum-seekers. The Associated Press. Retrieved September 12, 2019 from ICE shutters detention alternative for asylum-seekers | AP News
DHS. (2019). Annual Flow Report, REFUGEES AND ASYLEES: 2017. Retrieved September 12, 2019 from https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/Refugees_Asylees_2017.pdf (1.1 MB)
Gonzales, R. (2019, August 12). Trump Administration Seeks Decertification Of Immigration Judges’ Union. NPR. Retrieved September 12, 2019 from Justice Department Seeks To Decertify Union Of Immigration Judges : NPR
Immigration Judge Pay Rates. (2018). Executive Office for Immigration Review. Retrieved September 12, 2017 from https://www.justice.gov/eoir/page/file/991386/download
Johnson, C. (2017, October 16). Immigration Judges Warn Against Trump Administration Benchmarks. NPR. Retrieved September 12, 2019 from Immigration Judges Warn Against Trump Administration Benchmarks : NPR
Kopan, T. (2018, April 2). Justice Department rolls out case quotas for immigration judges. CNN. Retrieved September 12, 2019 from https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/02/politics/immigration-judges-quota/index.html
Leutert, S., Ezzell, E., Arvey, S., Sanchez, G., Yates, C., & Kuhne, P. (2019a, May). METERING UPDATE. Retrieved August 28, 2019 from https://www.strausscenter.org/images/strauss/18-19/MSI/Metering-Report-May-2019-MSI_5.20.pdf (883 KB)
Leutert, S., Ezzell, E., Arvey, S., Sanchez, G., Yates, C., & Kuhne, P. (2019b, August). METERING UPDATE. Retrieved August 28, 2019 from https://www.strausscenter.org/images/MSI/MeteringUpdate_190808.pdf (3.47 MB)
Taxin, A. (2019, July 23). Trump puts his stamp on nation’s immigration courts. The Associated Press. Retrieved September 12, 2019 from Trump puts his stamp on nation's immigration courts | AP News
~Max
Have any Democratic opinion-makers come out in favor of Open Borders?
When I read this I wasn’t sure whether your intended meaning was
Left-wingers support “Open borders.”
or
There is a (mis)conception or “strawman” position that 'Left-wingers support “Open borders” '.
The follow-ups didn’t clarify this, so let me ask OP: Which was your intended meaning?
In the context of QuickSilver’s post, I think it’s clear that he meant exactly what he wrote. ‘Left-wingers support “Open Borders”’ would be said by right-wingers, while ‘Right-wingers support “Send them back - we’re full!”’ would be said by left-wingers. QuickSilver proceeded to note that neither of those supposed positions make for rational policy.
~Max
You want “rational” immigration policy? Easy – it’s what W tried and failed to pass in 2007.
It’s a shame America Rock never did a musical cartoon on immigration. (Nor on the Civil War, for that matter.)
Thanks for having my back, Max S.
Yes, this is correct. Extreme parties on both sides accuse the other of those specific and equally extreme views. I believe that neither position accurately represents the respective side, with the possible exception of a very small minority. To the extent that these may be actual positions, I consider them to be bad immigration policy.
That’s some deeper than average analysis, Max S. I won’t check your math and I don’t feel like calculating what financial impact a 25% increase in judges would have on the backlog. But I assume it would have a 25% increase on cost of adjudication of cases. It should also have a similar decrease on cost of maintenance of detainees being kept in the facilities; or are we dispensing with that in lieu of the ankle bracelets? In which case, are the people awaiting adjudication doing so north or south of the border? Are they able to work in the meantime? Children able to attend school? Which economy are they contributing to while waiting? This gets really complex, really quickly? We may need to ask BDO.
Because they see no other way in.
I don’t like the phrase “illegal aliens” because people are never illegal. OTOH, I don’t like “undocumented immigrants” because that implies the only problem is they neglected to fill out some paperwork. No. the problem is that our legal-immigration quotas are so low that most applicants would be rejected. I prefer “impermissive immigrants” – they are in the country without the required official permission.
This country is big enough and rich enough to absorb the entire population of Mexico.